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Iranica Heirloom: Persian Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Ahmad Karimi‐Hakkak
Ahmad Karimi‐Hakkak*
Affiliation:
Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilization, University of Washington
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Extract

As We Enter a New Century and Millennium, We Tend to View More entities as forged, made up, invented—constructed is the more professional term in scholarship—than we did at any time in the past. Not only poems, paintings and other artifacts, but a whole range of phenomena, from an individual's sense of identity, to categories of knowledge or scientific disciplines, to feelings of belonging to professional, ethnic, or national entities, are thought of not as “natural” or “given” but as imagined, constructed. Languages and cultures themselves are said to be constructs, more or less fictional occurrences set forth as real by the force of massive belief in their “realness.” Under such circumstances we might well once again raise the question of how one conceptualizes—or evaluates, to move the matter on to the axiological plane—those epitomes of collective cultural construction, namely culture-specific encyclopedias, works of scholarship that were once thought of, rather naively, simply as “research tools”?

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 3-4: A Review of the “Encyclopaedia Iranica” , Summer Fall 1998 , pp. 527 - 542
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1998

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References

1. I seize on this occasion to cite an insightful observation on nightingales in Iran which occurs in Burgess's, Edward Letters from Persia (New York: The New York Public Library, 1942)Google Scholar and which the author of the EIr essay may not have seen. It is followed by an equally close description of the variety of roses in Iran, but I leave that out for the sake of brevity: “There are I believe no nightingales at Tabreez, I never heard one north of Sultania. At Casveen, Tehran, and Isphahan during the rose season they make such a noise as to be almost unpleasant. After a day or two their constant singing is nearly annoying. I recollect one which appeared to sing four and twenty hours almost without stopping in a tree close to my window, most likely it was a succession of nightingales who kept up this singing, but the effect was as if one was constantly singing. The cats eat a great many of them. The Persians say the nightingales are in love with the roses, and that they sing to them until they lose their senses and being in a sort of singing rapture or stupor the cats catch them without much trouble. The love of the nightingale for the rose is the orthodox belief of the Persians, but I can bear witness to the fact, that their note is scarcely ever heard except in the rose season—let naturalists determine why.” (p. 68, letter written from Tabriz by Edward Burgess to his mother Mrs. Henry Burgess, dated November 7, 1844).

2. There appears to be a similar indeterminacy in these two colors in Greco-Roman culture. See Umberto Eco's insightful article, “How Culture Conditions the Colours We See,” in Blonsky, Marshall ed., On Signs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) 157-75.Google Scholar

3. Allusions to blue as related to, or visible at the core of, the truth abound in Sohrab Sepehri's poetry. See, for example, “Ṣedā-ye Pā-ye Āb” (The Sound of Water's Footsteps) in Hasht Ketāb (The Eight Volumes), 5th ed. (Tehran: Tahuri, 1984) 267-99Google Scholar; see particularly p. 294. The poem is dated 1964.

4. See Shamlu, Ahmad “Tarāneh-ye Ābī” (The Blue Song) in Dar Jedāl bā Khāntūshī (In Fighting with Silence) (Tehran: Sokhan Publications, 1997) 377-79.Google Scholar The poem is dated 1976.

5. Dāᶜī Jān Nāpel'on, Iraj Pezeshkzad's farcical narrative of pathological megalomania and political intrigue first published in the late 1960s, is now available to English readers in a delightful and luminous English translation: Iraj Pezeshkzad, My Uncle Napoleon, tr. Davis, Dick (Washington, D.C.: Mage Publishers, 1996).Google Scholar

8. See Karimi-Hakkak, Ahmad “Language Reform Movement and its Language: The Case of Persian,” in Jernudd, Bjorn H. and Shapiro, Michael J. eds., The Politics of Language Purism (Berlin/New York: Morton de Gruyter, 1989), 81-104.Google Scholar

7. Since this entry deals only with the evolution of children's literature in Iran, it would have been advisable to mention this limitation in the title. This is particularly significant since we know that in Soviet Tajikistan a lively tradition of imaginative readings created exclusively for children existed for almost seventy years. Certainly this body of children's literature in the Persian-speaking world deserves to be included in some form.